After raging on in last week’s column about the 2014 mid-term elections, I said that this week I would address those of one hundred years ago, in 1914. I shall, but in context.
Woodrow Wilson was similar to Barack Obama in being a Democrat whose administration was being judged in 1912. The Democratic Party was in far worse shape then than now, having had only one other occupant of the White House since 1860, when Abraham Lincoln became the first Republican president. And that Democrat, Grover Cleveland, was not really a Democrat, certainly not in today's terms.
Republicans understood this and targeted him more for his personal failings than for his ideology. The only president to serve non-consecutive terms, the slogan against Cleveland was: “Ma, Ma, Where’s My Pa?” “Gone to Washington, ha, ha!” He had in fact impregnated a woman in his youth and refused to marry her, but (male) voters excused that in 1884. He lost his 1888 reelection to Benjamin Harrison, from a family that came close to being the era’s equivalent of the Bushes, but in 1892, Cleveland again prevailed. This time the public was scandalized by the fact that he married a much younger woman, with whom he went on to have five children. She held the equivalent of the first press conference by a first lady to deny rumors that he beat her.
Cleveland not only opposed the vote for women, but any sort of female activism, including women’s civic clubs. Little about his agenda challenged the plutocrats who governed during the era appropriately called the Robber Baron Age. Just as now, these men exploited the huge number of immigrants who came to America to fill jobs in factories and farms. Major immigration had begun with the Irish and Germans and Scandinavians in the 1850s, and after the Civil War, they were joined by people from Russia, Poland, Hungary, and other parts of eastern Europe, especially Jews, as well as Italians from its south. They had no job protection whatsoever, but some got free land under the Homestead Act, and like today’s aspiring immigrants, worked hard to create a better life for their children.
Immigrant labor was a large part of what made the Robber Barons rich, but it also was because of government largess. Men such as Florida railroaders Henry Plant and Henry Flagler manipulated both federal and state law, gaining millions of acres that they sold for development and spent on ostentatious displays of wealth -- such as the Tampa Bay Hotel, which never made a profit. Local government built the first bridge over the Hillsborough River at Plant’s demand and gave him a huge, permanent break on the property taxes that other residents paid. The Florida legislature even passed a law to enable Flagler to divorce the wife he had put in a nursing home so that he could marry a younger and richer woman. Helpful legislators repealed it as soon as Flagler had taken advantage of it.
Also called “The Gilded Age,” much of its faux prosperity collapsed in 1873 and again in 1893, with unemployment so serious that some people starved. With no unemployment compensation, no Social Security, or other earned benefits, especially immigrants who lacked family support suffered in northern cities. In rural areas, farmers went bankrupt because of high interest rates and the high prices that the (government subsidized) railroads charged to ship produce to market. Mary Ellen Lease of Kansas, called “Mary Yellin” by her detractors, argued that farmers should raise “less corn and more hell.”
The political result was an emergence of sizable third parties. Two-party elections had been the rule since General George McClellan, a Democrat, challenged Lincoln in 1864. By 1884, however, when Cleveland won his first term, both the Prohibition Party and the Greenback & Anti-Monopoly Party held conventions and named presidential nominees. Later elections included parties named People’s, Populist, Union Labor, Silver Fusion, and others. Almost all were unabashedly leftist, and a million people would vote Socialist by 1912. At the turn of the century, the largest of these groups was the Progressive Party.
Theodore Roosevelt was president then – accidentally. If you watched the recent PBS series on that family, you may recall that his Republican Party named him vice president in 1900 largely to get him out of the way, as the vice presidency traditionally was a political dead end. But an assassin changed the course of history – and yes, there was much more political violence (and violence of all sorts) then than now. During the 46 years between 1865 and 1901, Americans endured the murder of three presidents. William McKinley, who personified everything that plutocrats wanted, was shot in 1901 and Teddy Roosevelt president.
He had been a national name for just a few years, when most people first heard of him in connection with the Spanish-American War of 1898. As you doubtless know, Colonel Roosevelt stayed at our Tampa Bay Hotel while preparing to go to Cuba, and he shaped the adventure into an image that would be the envy of any PR agent today. But earlier in his life, while mourning the death of his wife and mother on the same day, he spent enough time outside of his native New York society class to understand the grievances of western miners and prairie farmers. He saw the danger inherent in giving too much wealth to too few people, and his administration was dominated by “trust busting” of interlocking monopolies. Congress joined him in regulating big business and protecting consumers.
Roosevelt easily won in 1904, and after seven years in the White House, willingly let his party nominate William Howard Taft as his replacement in 1908. (OK, I can’t let this pass without repeating Teddy’s comment about his only child by his first wife, who later married the Speaker of the House and became Alice Roosevelt Longworth. She was a political conservative and a social libertine, and he said of the young woman: “I can either govern the country or govern Alice; I can’t do both.”) Historians still argue about whether the Taft administration was as much of a conservative backlash as Roosevelt believed, but TR decided to get into the 1912 race. Perhaps he only missed the limelight, but he split the Republican Party when he accepted the nomination of the Progressive Party. It’s sometimes called the Bull Moose Party, an apt term for Roosevelt’s outsized machismo.
And that’s how Woodrow Wilson won the 1912 presidential election. A united Democratic Party carried 435 electoral votes, while Roosevelt’s Progressives won 88, and the poor Republican nominee, incumbent president William Howard Taft, got just eight. (And yes, he was the very image of a fat cat, so obese that he did indeed get stuck in his bathtub.) So now you have the context for the 1914 mid-term elections, which would be a stamp of approval or disapproval for this first modern Democratic president.
* * *
Women’s history is taught so badly that many people assume female enfranchisement just fell from the sky in 1920, when “the time was ripe,” so to weave it properly into the full political scene for 1914, we also need context on it. The first meeting of feminists calling for the right to vote was in 1848. Annual meetings thereafter grew the movement, but the Civil War intervened – and after it, leadership split on whether or not to oppose the 15th Amendment to the US Constitution, which enfranchised male ex-slaves but not women of any color or taxpayer status. Well, actually the amendment didn’t bother to spell out gender as a voting qualification, but everyone knew it was intended to benefit only black men – especially after the Supreme Court said so in 1874.
By then, women had been enfranchised in two Western jurisdictions. The first was the Wyoming Territory in December 1869. Its male-to-female ratio was about 20 to one, and because men wanted women to move to Wyoming, they not only granted the vote, but also other civil rights, including equal pay in government jobs. This was at the territory’s organizational meeting, and when Wyoming became a state in 1890, its men courageously insisted that women remain voters under statehood.
That was not the case in nearby Utah. It was settled by polygamist Mormons, and just weeks after the Wyoming Territory granted the vote, in January 1870, the Utah Territory did the same. Women voted for seventeen years, until Congress repealed their right in 1887. They regained it with statehood in 1895 – and in 1896, Utah was the first to elect a woman to its state senate. Women in the Washington Territory won the vote in 1883, but lost it in a court decision four years later. The era’s courts, in fact, were much more conservative than its voters, and countless cases on the issue were heartbreaking losses – in contrast to today, when courts generally are siding with gay rights advocates.
Colorado women were enfranchised in 1893, and three – all from minor parties – were elected to its House the next year. Idaho women won a perfectly conducted campaign in 1896, and like Wyoming and Colorado, those citizens never lost their rights. Then there was a long losing spell, from 1896 to 1911. I believe the basic cause of this stagnation was that aging feminists became more interested in being respectable than in being the fighters they had been in their youth. Nor did women in the urban East accord western winners the leadership positions that they merited.
California revitalized the issue in 1911 with a sophisticated, expensive winning campaign, including hiring security guards to watch ballot boxes. (Yes, there was infinitely more voter fraud then than now, much of it by the officials in charge of elections.) By the 1912 presidential election that Woodrow Wilson won, women in three more states were enfranchised: Kansas, which had held its first referendum on the issue in 1867; Oregon, where women had run six losing statewide referenda before victory; and Arizona, which moved from territorial status to statehood that year.
The Alaska Territory was akin to Wyoming in that it enfranchised women at its first organizational meeting in 1913. Montana and Nevada men behaved similarly, with women winning on the first attempt. Thus, by the mid-term congressional elections of November 1914, women had full voting rights in twelve states or territories, all of them in the West. And that’s when things got complicated.
* * *
American women had begun the effort for the vote, but by 1914, several nations had shown themselves to be more democratic than we. Women in New Zealand, Australia, Norway, Finland, and Denmark had full rights by then, while Canadian women were well on their way. Perhaps because other parts of the British Empire were ahead of the Mother Country, Englishwomen adopted more militant tactics. They stood on soapboxes to speak on street corners and faced down the jeers of rowdy men. When Parliament paid no attention, they set fires in mailboxes and began other property damage. International feminist meetings in Denmark in 1906 and in Holland in 1908 hotly debated the legitimacy and probable success of such strategies, but despite criticism, women in both Scotland and England carried on their radicalism.
Several young Americans, most notably Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, were students in Britain when the militant tactics arose. Returned to America, they organized a march at Wilson’s 1913 inauguration. It was the first such in the capital, and police did not know how to respond to marching women; it soon became a mob scene as men physically attacked them. Within the movement, these young women challenged the leadership of Rev. Dr. Anna Howard Shaw. They were right to do so: both an ordained minister and a physician, she was a much better orator than a politician. But the militants nonetheless were wrong on political fundamentals.
They had been trained in the British system, in which the party that wins the most seats in Parliament wins the executive position, that of prime minister. In the American system, the chief executive, the president, is elected entirely separately from members of Congress. Moreover, in the American system, a constitutional amendment – which was the only way to overturn the 1874 Supreme Court decision that said the 15th Amendment didn’t apply to women – has no role whatsoever for the president. Instead, constitutional amendments must be passed by 2/3 of both houses of Congress and then ratified by ¾ of the state legislatures. Presidents can neither sign nor veto them.
Alice Paul and her minions in what soon was known as the National Woman’s Party couldn’t quite seem to understand that. Just as they had targeted the prime minister abroad, they targeted President Wilson here. Since then, many media folk have used similar political simplicity in films such as “Iron Jawed Angels.” The visibility techniques of the Woman’s Party make it easy to display much footage that is anti-Wilson, while legal situation of constitutional amendments is too subtle for filmmakers. Nor do they pay much attention to the fact that Wilson did support the amendment in his second term. One of his four daughters actually was a major leader in the mainstream group, the National American Women Suffrage Association.
The militants, who soon would call themselves the National Woman’s Party, spurned the experienced leaders in the NAWSA, sometimes behaving as if the older women were as great an enemy as the (now forgotten) conservative organization, the National Association Opposed to Woman’s Suffrage. It nonetheless is true that the militants suffered for the cause. They chained themselves to the White House fence, and especially after the US entered World War I, they accepted the fact that they would be arrested as security threats. Jailed under harsh conditions, they went on hunger strikes and endured forced feeding through tubes stuffed down their throats. When I think of that, I can’t comprehend how today’s women can view feminism so indifferently that they won’t bother to get out and vote once every two years.
But most of this radicalism was after the 1914 congressional elections, and that is what I want to emphasize: it is important to think carefully, not just to feel passionately. Following their anti-Wilson strategy, Woman’s Party leaders did not work for candidates who supported the vote for women, but instead simply worked against Wilson’s congressional allies. They targeted the defeat of Democrats in nine western states where women could vote, and their visibility tactics proved successful. They hired railroad cars, placarded them with banners, and traveled hundreds of miles speaking at depot stops. Reporters were glad to cover these young, stylish, and attraction-getting women, and they succeeded in their highly questionable strategy. The Woman’s Party defeated twenty Democratic congressmen -- who supported the vote for women!
The mainstream leadership was livid, and the two groups permanently parted ways. Some experienced women, including Florida leader May Mann Jennings, saw the young women’s strategy as so incomprehensible that they wondered aloud if the Woman’s Party was a secret arm of the Republican Party. Alice Paul and most of her supporters, in fact, identified more with Republicans than with Democrats -- and with its base in the “Solid South,” the Democratic Party was arguably as conservative as Republicans until the Great Depression, when Franklin Roosevelt became president with the populist landslide of 1932. But both Republicans and Democrats supported the 19th Amendment that finally brought the vote to women of every state in 1920. The mainstreamers then transformed themselves into the League of Women Voters, while the Woman’s Party began its decline.
During the Roaring Twenties, many of them preferred to promote changes in dress and behavior more than they wanted to work for political change. They were akin to Alice Roosevelt Longworth, for whom freedom meant smoking cigarettes, drinking illegal alcohol, wearing “flapper” dresses, dancing to jazz, and engaging in sexual escapades. They were not the League of Women Voters type – a la Eleanor Roosevelt – who were interested in issues of governance and peace and a better world for children,. But millionaire Alva Vanderbilt Belmont bought the Woman’s Party a mansion on Capitol Hill, where its archives remain today, and it remained briefly active after the vote was won.
Alice Paul, who held three law degrees, especially merits credit for drafting the Equal Rights Amendment and getting it introduced in Congress in 1923. It was intended to provide rights beyond the vote, in areas such as equal access to education, employment, and credit. That it never has been ratified, however, is further evidence of her lack of political skill. She lived to 1977, but could not – or would not -- bridge the chasm that she created with the 1914 election.
The Woman’s Party is irrelevant now, but debate over tactics is not. Once again, a hundred years later, feminists are revisiting the methods we use to win elections. That debate is good because reevaluation and self-assessment always is worthwhile. Without encouraging complacency, though, I want to encourage you to remember that every election has its own context, and we should not read too much into any one of them. What’s really important is to remember that, eventually, liberals always win. The very definition of conservatism means to oppose change, to keep the status quo. All of the changes that have liberated women have been made by liberals, again by definition of those words. We may lose battles, as in 1914 and 2014, but ultimately we win the war.
Doris Weatherford writes a weekly column for La Gaceta, the nation's only trilingual newspaper. With pages in Spanish, Italian, and English, it has been published in Tampa since 1922.
Woodrow Wilson was similar to Barack Obama in being a Democrat whose administration was being judged in 1912. The Democratic Party was in far worse shape then than now, having had only one other occupant of the White House since 1860, when Abraham Lincoln became the first Republican president. And that Democrat, Grover Cleveland, was not really a Democrat, certainly not in today's terms.
Republicans understood this and targeted him more for his personal failings than for his ideology. The only president to serve non-consecutive terms, the slogan against Cleveland was: “Ma, Ma, Where’s My Pa?” “Gone to Washington, ha, ha!” He had in fact impregnated a woman in his youth and refused to marry her, but (male) voters excused that in 1884. He lost his 1888 reelection to Benjamin Harrison, from a family that came close to being the era’s equivalent of the Bushes, but in 1892, Cleveland again prevailed. This time the public was scandalized by the fact that he married a much younger woman, with whom he went on to have five children. She held the equivalent of the first press conference by a first lady to deny rumors that he beat her.
Cleveland not only opposed the vote for women, but any sort of female activism, including women’s civic clubs. Little about his agenda challenged the plutocrats who governed during the era appropriately called the Robber Baron Age. Just as now, these men exploited the huge number of immigrants who came to America to fill jobs in factories and farms. Major immigration had begun with the Irish and Germans and Scandinavians in the 1850s, and after the Civil War, they were joined by people from Russia, Poland, Hungary, and other parts of eastern Europe, especially Jews, as well as Italians from its south. They had no job protection whatsoever, but some got free land under the Homestead Act, and like today’s aspiring immigrants, worked hard to create a better life for their children.
Immigrant labor was a large part of what made the Robber Barons rich, but it also was because of government largess. Men such as Florida railroaders Henry Plant and Henry Flagler manipulated both federal and state law, gaining millions of acres that they sold for development and spent on ostentatious displays of wealth -- such as the Tampa Bay Hotel, which never made a profit. Local government built the first bridge over the Hillsborough River at Plant’s demand and gave him a huge, permanent break on the property taxes that other residents paid. The Florida legislature even passed a law to enable Flagler to divorce the wife he had put in a nursing home so that he could marry a younger and richer woman. Helpful legislators repealed it as soon as Flagler had taken advantage of it.
Also called “The Gilded Age,” much of its faux prosperity collapsed in 1873 and again in 1893, with unemployment so serious that some people starved. With no unemployment compensation, no Social Security, or other earned benefits, especially immigrants who lacked family support suffered in northern cities. In rural areas, farmers went bankrupt because of high interest rates and the high prices that the (government subsidized) railroads charged to ship produce to market. Mary Ellen Lease of Kansas, called “Mary Yellin” by her detractors, argued that farmers should raise “less corn and more hell.”
The political result was an emergence of sizable third parties. Two-party elections had been the rule since General George McClellan, a Democrat, challenged Lincoln in 1864. By 1884, however, when Cleveland won his first term, both the Prohibition Party and the Greenback & Anti-Monopoly Party held conventions and named presidential nominees. Later elections included parties named People’s, Populist, Union Labor, Silver Fusion, and others. Almost all were unabashedly leftist, and a million people would vote Socialist by 1912. At the turn of the century, the largest of these groups was the Progressive Party.
Theodore Roosevelt was president then – accidentally. If you watched the recent PBS series on that family, you may recall that his Republican Party named him vice president in 1900 largely to get him out of the way, as the vice presidency traditionally was a political dead end. But an assassin changed the course of history – and yes, there was much more political violence (and violence of all sorts) then than now. During the 46 years between 1865 and 1901, Americans endured the murder of three presidents. William McKinley, who personified everything that plutocrats wanted, was shot in 1901 and Teddy Roosevelt president.
He had been a national name for just a few years, when most people first heard of him in connection with the Spanish-American War of 1898. As you doubtless know, Colonel Roosevelt stayed at our Tampa Bay Hotel while preparing to go to Cuba, and he shaped the adventure into an image that would be the envy of any PR agent today. But earlier in his life, while mourning the death of his wife and mother on the same day, he spent enough time outside of his native New York society class to understand the grievances of western miners and prairie farmers. He saw the danger inherent in giving too much wealth to too few people, and his administration was dominated by “trust busting” of interlocking monopolies. Congress joined him in regulating big business and protecting consumers.
Roosevelt easily won in 1904, and after seven years in the White House, willingly let his party nominate William Howard Taft as his replacement in 1908. (OK, I can’t let this pass without repeating Teddy’s comment about his only child by his first wife, who later married the Speaker of the House and became Alice Roosevelt Longworth. She was a political conservative and a social libertine, and he said of the young woman: “I can either govern the country or govern Alice; I can’t do both.”) Historians still argue about whether the Taft administration was as much of a conservative backlash as Roosevelt believed, but TR decided to get into the 1912 race. Perhaps he only missed the limelight, but he split the Republican Party when he accepted the nomination of the Progressive Party. It’s sometimes called the Bull Moose Party, an apt term for Roosevelt’s outsized machismo.
And that’s how Woodrow Wilson won the 1912 presidential election. A united Democratic Party carried 435 electoral votes, while Roosevelt’s Progressives won 88, and the poor Republican nominee, incumbent president William Howard Taft, got just eight. (And yes, he was the very image of a fat cat, so obese that he did indeed get stuck in his bathtub.) So now you have the context for the 1914 mid-term elections, which would be a stamp of approval or disapproval for this first modern Democratic president.
* * *
Women’s history is taught so badly that many people assume female enfranchisement just fell from the sky in 1920, when “the time was ripe,” so to weave it properly into the full political scene for 1914, we also need context on it. The first meeting of feminists calling for the right to vote was in 1848. Annual meetings thereafter grew the movement, but the Civil War intervened – and after it, leadership split on whether or not to oppose the 15th Amendment to the US Constitution, which enfranchised male ex-slaves but not women of any color or taxpayer status. Well, actually the amendment didn’t bother to spell out gender as a voting qualification, but everyone knew it was intended to benefit only black men – especially after the Supreme Court said so in 1874.
By then, women had been enfranchised in two Western jurisdictions. The first was the Wyoming Territory in December 1869. Its male-to-female ratio was about 20 to one, and because men wanted women to move to Wyoming, they not only granted the vote, but also other civil rights, including equal pay in government jobs. This was at the territory’s organizational meeting, and when Wyoming became a state in 1890, its men courageously insisted that women remain voters under statehood.
That was not the case in nearby Utah. It was settled by polygamist Mormons, and just weeks after the Wyoming Territory granted the vote, in January 1870, the Utah Territory did the same. Women voted for seventeen years, until Congress repealed their right in 1887. They regained it with statehood in 1895 – and in 1896, Utah was the first to elect a woman to its state senate. Women in the Washington Territory won the vote in 1883, but lost it in a court decision four years later. The era’s courts, in fact, were much more conservative than its voters, and countless cases on the issue were heartbreaking losses – in contrast to today, when courts generally are siding with gay rights advocates.
Colorado women were enfranchised in 1893, and three – all from minor parties – were elected to its House the next year. Idaho women won a perfectly conducted campaign in 1896, and like Wyoming and Colorado, those citizens never lost their rights. Then there was a long losing spell, from 1896 to 1911. I believe the basic cause of this stagnation was that aging feminists became more interested in being respectable than in being the fighters they had been in their youth. Nor did women in the urban East accord western winners the leadership positions that they merited.
California revitalized the issue in 1911 with a sophisticated, expensive winning campaign, including hiring security guards to watch ballot boxes. (Yes, there was infinitely more voter fraud then than now, much of it by the officials in charge of elections.) By the 1912 presidential election that Woodrow Wilson won, women in three more states were enfranchised: Kansas, which had held its first referendum on the issue in 1867; Oregon, where women had run six losing statewide referenda before victory; and Arizona, which moved from territorial status to statehood that year.
The Alaska Territory was akin to Wyoming in that it enfranchised women at its first organizational meeting in 1913. Montana and Nevada men behaved similarly, with women winning on the first attempt. Thus, by the mid-term congressional elections of November 1914, women had full voting rights in twelve states or territories, all of them in the West. And that’s when things got complicated.
* * *
American women had begun the effort for the vote, but by 1914, several nations had shown themselves to be more democratic than we. Women in New Zealand, Australia, Norway, Finland, and Denmark had full rights by then, while Canadian women were well on their way. Perhaps because other parts of the British Empire were ahead of the Mother Country, Englishwomen adopted more militant tactics. They stood on soapboxes to speak on street corners and faced down the jeers of rowdy men. When Parliament paid no attention, they set fires in mailboxes and began other property damage. International feminist meetings in Denmark in 1906 and in Holland in 1908 hotly debated the legitimacy and probable success of such strategies, but despite criticism, women in both Scotland and England carried on their radicalism.
Several young Americans, most notably Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, were students in Britain when the militant tactics arose. Returned to America, they organized a march at Wilson’s 1913 inauguration. It was the first such in the capital, and police did not know how to respond to marching women; it soon became a mob scene as men physically attacked them. Within the movement, these young women challenged the leadership of Rev. Dr. Anna Howard Shaw. They were right to do so: both an ordained minister and a physician, she was a much better orator than a politician. But the militants nonetheless were wrong on political fundamentals.
They had been trained in the British system, in which the party that wins the most seats in Parliament wins the executive position, that of prime minister. In the American system, the chief executive, the president, is elected entirely separately from members of Congress. Moreover, in the American system, a constitutional amendment – which was the only way to overturn the 1874 Supreme Court decision that said the 15th Amendment didn’t apply to women – has no role whatsoever for the president. Instead, constitutional amendments must be passed by 2/3 of both houses of Congress and then ratified by ¾ of the state legislatures. Presidents can neither sign nor veto them.
Alice Paul and her minions in what soon was known as the National Woman’s Party couldn’t quite seem to understand that. Just as they had targeted the prime minister abroad, they targeted President Wilson here. Since then, many media folk have used similar political simplicity in films such as “Iron Jawed Angels.” The visibility techniques of the Woman’s Party make it easy to display much footage that is anti-Wilson, while legal situation of constitutional amendments is too subtle for filmmakers. Nor do they pay much attention to the fact that Wilson did support the amendment in his second term. One of his four daughters actually was a major leader in the mainstream group, the National American Women Suffrage Association.
The militants, who soon would call themselves the National Woman’s Party, spurned the experienced leaders in the NAWSA, sometimes behaving as if the older women were as great an enemy as the (now forgotten) conservative organization, the National Association Opposed to Woman’s Suffrage. It nonetheless is true that the militants suffered for the cause. They chained themselves to the White House fence, and especially after the US entered World War I, they accepted the fact that they would be arrested as security threats. Jailed under harsh conditions, they went on hunger strikes and endured forced feeding through tubes stuffed down their throats. When I think of that, I can’t comprehend how today’s women can view feminism so indifferently that they won’t bother to get out and vote once every two years.
But most of this radicalism was after the 1914 congressional elections, and that is what I want to emphasize: it is important to think carefully, not just to feel passionately. Following their anti-Wilson strategy, Woman’s Party leaders did not work for candidates who supported the vote for women, but instead simply worked against Wilson’s congressional allies. They targeted the defeat of Democrats in nine western states where women could vote, and their visibility tactics proved successful. They hired railroad cars, placarded them with banners, and traveled hundreds of miles speaking at depot stops. Reporters were glad to cover these young, stylish, and attraction-getting women, and they succeeded in their highly questionable strategy. The Woman’s Party defeated twenty Democratic congressmen -- who supported the vote for women!
The mainstream leadership was livid, and the two groups permanently parted ways. Some experienced women, including Florida leader May Mann Jennings, saw the young women’s strategy as so incomprehensible that they wondered aloud if the Woman’s Party was a secret arm of the Republican Party. Alice Paul and most of her supporters, in fact, identified more with Republicans than with Democrats -- and with its base in the “Solid South,” the Democratic Party was arguably as conservative as Republicans until the Great Depression, when Franklin Roosevelt became president with the populist landslide of 1932. But both Republicans and Democrats supported the 19th Amendment that finally brought the vote to women of every state in 1920. The mainstreamers then transformed themselves into the League of Women Voters, while the Woman’s Party began its decline.
During the Roaring Twenties, many of them preferred to promote changes in dress and behavior more than they wanted to work for political change. They were akin to Alice Roosevelt Longworth, for whom freedom meant smoking cigarettes, drinking illegal alcohol, wearing “flapper” dresses, dancing to jazz, and engaging in sexual escapades. They were not the League of Women Voters type – a la Eleanor Roosevelt – who were interested in issues of governance and peace and a better world for children,. But millionaire Alva Vanderbilt Belmont bought the Woman’s Party a mansion on Capitol Hill, where its archives remain today, and it remained briefly active after the vote was won.
Alice Paul, who held three law degrees, especially merits credit for drafting the Equal Rights Amendment and getting it introduced in Congress in 1923. It was intended to provide rights beyond the vote, in areas such as equal access to education, employment, and credit. That it never has been ratified, however, is further evidence of her lack of political skill. She lived to 1977, but could not – or would not -- bridge the chasm that she created with the 1914 election.
The Woman’s Party is irrelevant now, but debate over tactics is not. Once again, a hundred years later, feminists are revisiting the methods we use to win elections. That debate is good because reevaluation and self-assessment always is worthwhile. Without encouraging complacency, though, I want to encourage you to remember that every election has its own context, and we should not read too much into any one of them. What’s really important is to remember that, eventually, liberals always win. The very definition of conservatism means to oppose change, to keep the status quo. All of the changes that have liberated women have been made by liberals, again by definition of those words. We may lose battles, as in 1914 and 2014, but ultimately we win the war.
Doris Weatherford writes a weekly column for La Gaceta, the nation's only trilingual newspaper. With pages in Spanish, Italian, and English, it has been published in Tampa since 1922.